Talk:Portal: Gameplay
I'd like to push forward some sort of more centralized reorg - right now the pages are very cluttered and not very easy to follow, trying to fulfill multiple purposes. Ideally it seems like there should be a game split and then a cleaner (story) and (gameplay) race split, starting with the races and working down from their hierarchically, similar to b.net. Right now it's difficult to find things, particularly with Starcraft II and Starcraft mixed in with Brood War. I'm a bit confused as to which page type you're talking about. Are you talking about the race pages, or the unit pages, or ... I'm just not sure. Kimera 757 (talk) 19:32, 24 December 2008 (UTC) Or all of them? There's a few unit pages, like infested terran and dark templar, that are split between lore (original name) and game unit articles (eg dark templar (game unit)). This was done because the lore section for those articles were very large, and the strategy section was very small. For articles that get a lot from both (eg the new marine article) we could split them the same way. Is that what you meant? Kimera 757 (talk) 19:48, 24 December 2008 (UTC) Yes, as the strategy sections grow, there's much less overlap in usage for both race and unit pages. I'm recommending we split and cross-link them, as needed. I'm not a ui organization expert. If it's easier to use some sort of table of contents or disambiguation system over sub-pages, that's great too. Right now I find it a bit overwhelming - there's a lot of backstory presented first, SCII information that could confuse with SC1, and images that take up much of the page that could be summarized in a column (like the initial unit description) or a few lines of text. 20:21, 24 December 2008 (UTC) A change this big, then, would need discussion. I'll talk to Meco, Hawki and other frequent visitors and ask for their input as well. The pages might be clunky, but IMO we should get the info onto those pages now, and give ourselves a day or two before we start splitting pages (or columnizing pages, etc) so we can get a consensus. Meco is especially good at this kind of organizational thing, so I'll send him a message about this. Kimera 757 (talk) 20:25, 24 December 2008 (UTC) If the gameplay sections are about to get real large then I see the merit of splitting them off into their own articles, even for each game if necessary. The major work will be to come up with a sane system of naming those articles. Relinking will be a pain, but it's another thing we can do as we go. And now for me to start throwing out half-baked ideas... Lore articles names would use the current names, so lore for marines would be Marine. Game specific info (like gameplay) would go into Marine (StarCraft), Marine (StarCraft II), etc.. Although I don't know if this would be worth it for StarCraft: Ghost articles since those would be rather small. Linking would be through a template, like . would link to a general disambiguation page for all the gameplay articles. This is the page the lore article links to. Gameplay articles will link directly back to the lore page. Meco 23:53, 25 December 2008 (UTC) Regarding categorization and navigation boxes, do we intend to have one set of categories and boxes for lore articles and another set for gameplay? We have all the gameplay boxes already, but only terran ground vehicles and starships have lore boxes. We can create new lore categories based on the lore boxes. If we go this route, a sub-thought is that the lore boxes and categories for terran and protoss "infantry" should be called "professions" or "occupations". Meco 00:46, 4 January 2009 (UTC) We would have to split up the categories, yes. I agree, we could make boxes for professions, and then we could split off some articles like wranglers (currently part of the Ghost Program article), scientist, and so forth. Kimera 757 (talk) 01:31, 4 January 2009 (UTC) I'm still not sold on the Marine being lore over gameplay. It's not that it doesn't make sense, it's just messy. I myself type marine into the search box and miss the gameplay link when I go to edit. Since visitors are most likely to be looking for gameplay from the search box, would it make sense to do some sort of disambiguation or something? Right now it's at least 3 clicks to get to the marine gameplay page from the search bar. Klomer 06:11, 7 January 2009 (UTC) I think using disambiguation is actually a good idea. Either that, or put marine (StarCraft) and marine (StarCraft II) links at the top of the marine page. Kimera 757 (talk) 23:34, 7 January 2009 (UTC) Cool - if that's sounds good to you Meco could someone set up an example for me? Klomer 03:42, 8 January 2009 (UTC)